Enable Hyper Personalization with AWS
Today when every customer has more choices and information than ever by just one click of the finger, the possibility of finding highly irrelevant products and advertisements also increases. Things have evolved in the Marketing sphere from make the product, the customer will themselves buy it, to targeted advertisements and much more now!
Every message today has only 7 seconds to capture and hold the attention of the user.[1] Gone are the days where Personalization only referred to the name of the customer on the Email received from a brand. Customers today want not just cohort personalization but one-to-one marketing with products, communication and marketing tactics specifically tailored to their needs with perfect timing. This is where Hyper-personalization comes in!
Hyper-personalization is the creation of custom and targeted experiences driven by developing a deep understanding of each customers unique set of needs, behavioural and psychographic, geographic and demographic data are utilized to tailor the customers interaction to their likeness.
Powering customer data to deliver meaningful customer experiences
While customers want individual needs and preferences to be catered to, real time data of customers across different channels and sources needs to be analysed and processed to reveal the usable insights. This is where CDP (Customer Data Platform) is deployed. CDP enables one to get a customer specific view, thus driving hyper-personalization and increasing the ROI.
Hyper-personalization starts by identifying the needs of the customers using layers of information gathered, proceeds to understanding the customer signals by listening and responding to the actions of the customers through the gathered data and responding to those customers. These actions are usually called ‘triggers’ and personalized responses to these triggers are much more effective than blast messages. It ends with building a roadmap and implementing it according to what elements should be used for the specific customer, when and how!
What is Amazon doing in this segment?
With its vast and reliable cloud computing services on AWS (Amazon Web Services), Amazon developed various products which can be leveraged when firms are trying to hyper-personalize their products and services for the end consumer. A few reasons why AWS is preferred in this field is:
· Breadth and Depth of AWS Services: It encompasses a wide range of services available for almost all use cases, doesn’t require to bring any other vendor tools and reduces latency, redundancy and the need to build, secure and support integration with marketing cloud providers or other disparate tools.
· World Class Recommendation Model: It has pre-built solutions based on 20 Years of Amazon’s recommendation experience and uses the same models that Amazon is using! It provides webservice to get clickstream data and provides real time recommendations based on change in the customer’s behavior without a need to retrain the model.
· Reduces Cost: It has a Pay as you go model and No licensing is required at the start of the project. It is extremely easy to maintain and also doesn’t require resources to secure or support integration
· Out of box dashboard capabilities: AWS Pinpoint has its own dashboard to view all marketing initiatives which is extremely useful. It also has Amazon cloud watch to view reports and metrics about the usage of different services.
AWS Products for hyper-personalization which can be leveraged-
Amazon Personalize
It is a Machine learning service that makes it easy for developers to create individualized recommendations for customers using their applications. It is an automated ML tool and is based on the same technology as Amzaon.com. It combines user interaction data with contextual data to generate high-quality recommendations, integrates easily with the existing tools and continuously learns, thus improving its performance over time.
It provides high-quality recommendations, helps the brands in owning the moment with real-time recommendations which make hyper-personalization extremely precise, personalizes every touchpoint along the user journey and delivers personalization within days, not months.
Example: Domino’s, Subway uses Amazon Personalize that enables them to apply context about individual customers and their circumstances, and deliver customized communications such as special deals and offers through their digital channels at scale across entire customer base[2]
Amazon Pinpoint
Another tool that AWS offers is Amazon Pinpoint. This helps in understanding and engaging customers by sending them personalized, timely, and relevant communications through multiple channels. It enables marketers and developers to deliver customer centric engagement experiences. This tool has 5 pillars: User Management, Audience Management, has targeting & Journey Tools across multiple channels and provides valuable Campaign & Journey Insights.
It aggregates, visualizes and customizes customer behavior, demographics, purchase activity and the engagement data. It has Powerful campaign and journey capabilities to ensure that the brands are sending the right message to the right customer at the right time through the right engagement channel. It can engage with Contact customers through multiple communication channels, including push notifications, emails or text messages! Thus, it is truly a One Service of Global Scale with Real-time insights and has the breadth and depth of AWS!
Example: Disney Streaming Services Uses Amazon Pinpoint to Send Personalized Messages to Millions of Users in Real Time. They use Amazon Pinpoint along with other AWS services to target right customers at the right time, monitor the performance of their campaigns in real time, and gain a deeper understanding of their users’ needs and desires.[3]
A few companies also use both the services for better Predictive User Engagement (PUE), to the integration of machine learning (ML) and customer engagement services.
Example: Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Ryanair, and EasyJet use Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Personalize to enhance the customer experience, deepens loyalty, drive operational efficiency and increases revenue by delivering the right message (offer) to the right customer over the right channel at the right time.[4]
The way forward in precision Marketing …
As companies realize that just analysing past data from personal and transactional history, to create advertisements for customers isn’t enough anymore, they are moving to deploy the use of AI and other tools to understand the more complex and evolved techniques to use real-time customer data to engage with them, have better customer profiling and interpret customer intent better, all ultimately leading to better conversion and higher ROI at lower costs! AWS though ahead of it’s competition in providing these services already, it will be interesting to look at new emerging companies offering such precision marketing!
[1] https://webengage.com/blog/hyper-personalization-marketing-future/#:~:text=Hyper%20personalization%20is%20a%20more,service%20information%20to%20every%20user.
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/customers/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-disney-streaming-services-uses-amazon-pinpoint-to-send-personalized-messages-to-millions-of-users-in-real-time/
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/cathay-pacific-rds-case-study/
